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Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

The Daily Standup/Scrum is not for the Scrum Master

Mike Cohn suggests that the Daily Scrum (or standup) is not just for the Scrum Master. Instead of a “status meeting” for the manager, it should be seen as a forum where team members are synchronizing their work.

I prefer to think of the daily scrum as a synchronization meeting. Team members are synchronizing their work: Here’s what I did yesterday and what I think I’ll do today. How about you? Done well a daily scrum (daily standup) meeting will feel energizing. People will leave the meeting enthused about the progress they heard others make.

Shane Hastie agrees with a similar view and feels that a manager gets to hear the status as a coincidental benefit of the daily standup.

The primary purpose of the daily standup is for the team members to communicate with each other about their progress against the tasks they are working on. A coincidental benefit is that a leader or manager gets to hear about what’s going on. The meeting is for the team NOT for the manager!

Team members are facing and talking to the manager or meeting facilitator instead of to the team. This indicates that the daily stand-up is for the manager/facilitator when it is actually supposed to be for the team.

Both Mike Cohn and Jason Yip suggest breaking eye contact as an effective and subtle technique to remind the speaker to address the team during the standup.

As Mike explains

Scrum teams do look at their Scrum Masters a bit like managers to whom they need to report status. By not making eye contact with someone giving an update, the Scrum Master can, in a subtle way, prevent each report becoming a one-way status report to the Scrum Master.

Aaron Sanders suggests a more radical experiment by asking Scrum Masters to skip a few daily standups to encourage the teams to self organize themselves.

What if the Scrum Masters for each team just did not show up? There would be no time to plan what to do. How would the teams organize? I’ve really been trying to impress on the teams to begin the meeting when scheduled, regardless of who is in the room. Would they think of this, and the fact that everyone is a Scrum Master, and get it going?

In the comments of Mike Cohn’s blog he also encourages Scrum Masters to also provide brief updates on their work.

I coach Scrum Masters to give (brief) updates on what they did. For example, if a Scrum Master never reports on removing impediments he’s told about, other team members may never mention them. They’ll think, “Why mention my impediment? I’ve never heard our Scrum Master say he’s resolved anyone else’s?”

Do you see team members often reporting to the leader in your daily standup? What techniques have you used to break out of this anti pattern?

Nothing new here

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Scrum has always encouraged that the daily scrum is a meeting for the team, not the SM. The SM might help start the process and make sure that it dosn't turn into a solution-discussion. But otherwise, stay out of the way.

Re: Nothing new here

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Indeed, this is simply the theory. Scrum masters sole role at the daily standup is making sure it's held at the same time every day, nothing more. But this article seems simply like a sponsored post of some consultancy organization (which scrum is full off).

People don't care about each other's job

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Wonderful idea, nice, almost platonic.

I was working in a lot of organizations. In our own little startup of 4 people, where each of us understood and was willing to switch to anyone else's task at short notice, it worked, without saying.

NOWHERE ELSE.

In large organizations, people just don't care what the other does right now. They scream for independent tasks, which could be run in parallel, which has nothing to do with someone else's task. They crave to have their own part with responsibility.

In teams where there was a group responsibility, I've seen it always only as a way to low-performers to hide, never as something which actually made the standup or whatever function.

At the end of the day, we have to have a working product released. At the end of the day, Conway's Law will likely kick in. Why to lie to ourselves?

(If you try to tell me that "all the 4 organizations you participated in, all, the 5+ teams you were part of,, all other the teams you have seen inside your own companies and all your developer friends' employers, they all do Agile wrong", I guess we should just spare each other's time: have fun with your ideal world)

since when is such "article" useful info?

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In every book or intro about SCRUM it is obvious who the stand-up is - for the team members.The "radical" suggestions just show how broken the SCRUM implementation can be, when done by the wrong people.

New tools

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Hi,Thanks for this nice article. We figured out that standup meetings are great but needed improvement (they took a lot of time, de-focussed our colleagues and interrupted their workflows). Because of this we developed a SaaS tool to "automate" the daily standup meetings - with just a single email. If you like to take a look: www.30secondsmail.com. Best,Ajie